Santorum: Poor Children Should Suffer So They Don’t Feel So Entitled
January 2, 2012

We just found this Think Progress video from November in which Rick says that poor children should have to suffer hunger and other ills to prevent them from developing the sense of entitlement that comes from relying on government social programs. Watch the video…

Monday, August 15. 2005
Santorum Says Manufacturing looks great since it lost all the weight

On Aug. 11, when Rick Santorum took U.S. Treasury Secretary John W. Snow on a tour of the Sony Technology Center in Mount Pleasant, he gave us a glimpse of just how seriously deluded he is regarding the state of Pennsylvania's manufacturing sector.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that Pennsylvania lost 155,967 manufacturing jobs from the first six months of 2001 through the first half of 2005 (a loss of 18.6 percent in the state's biggest industry sector).

As the primary season kicks into high gear, Nevada's Moonlite BunnyRanch brothel announced that it will once again support Republican candidate Ron Paul for President, according to a press release posted to the Daily Caller.

This is the second consecutive presidential election that the establishment -- popularized by the HBO series Cathouse -- is backing Paul in his bid for the Oval Office.

"We decided to go with the guy that’s more about state’s rights -- and that's Ron Paul," club owner Dennis Hof said.

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"We thought real closely about supporting Newt Gingrich -- because he's a cheater -- and we like cheaters," Hof added.

Santorum and Perry thought they had this endorsement locked up but Paul beat them out

If campaign donations are any sign, Mitt Romney is the runaway favorite candidate of billionaires and Wall Street bankers. Indeed, Wall Street has flooded his campaign with donations and a massive 10 percent of all American billionaires donated to his campaign. So it should probably come as no surprise that, in an interview with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, Romney called for the super wealthy to be able to give unlimited sums of money directly to candidates:

TODD: Do you think Citizens United was a bad decision?

ROMNEY:Well,I think the Supreme Court decision was following their interpretation of the campaign finance laws that were written by Congress. My own view is now we tried a lot of efforts to try and restrict what can be given to campaigns, we’d be a lot wiser to say you can give what you’d like to a campaign. They must report it immediately and the creation of these independent expenditure committees that have to be separate from the candidate, that’s just a bad idea.

Watch it:

It’s not entirely clear from this interview that Romney understands what happened in Citizens United. That decision emphatically did not follow any “interpretation of campaign finance laws that were written by Congress.” Rather, Citizens United threw out a 63 year-old federal ban on corporate money in politics. Citizens United was a case of five conservative justices deciding they knew better than America’s democratically elected representatives, and it was not a case of judges following the law.

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As Romney himself said in 1994, when you allow special interest groups to buy and sell candidates, “that kind of relationship has an influence on the way that going to vote.” Now that Romney’s running for president on the Wall Street ticket, however, he’s suddenly unconcerned with whether or not his big money donors exert a corrupting influence.

General Electric Co. (GE) agreed to pay $70.4 million to settle a criminal probe and civil claims for conspiring to rig bids on U.S. municipal-bond deals, overcharging state and local governments on investments.

GE Funding Capital Market Services, a former unit, is the fifth company to settle in a more than five-year federal investigation. The deal will resolve probes by the Justice Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Internal Revenue Service as well as attorneys general in 25 states, the Justice Department said today in a statement.

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The settlement will bring to $743 million the amount that banks have paid to end the case, some of which is being returned to localities that were overcharged, the SEC said in a news release. Bank of America Corp., (BAC) JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), UBS AG (UBSN) and Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC) previously settled similar cases.

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The Justice Department said it agreed not to prosecute GE Funding because it admitted its illegal conduct, cooperated with the investigation and took steps to address anticompetitive conduct. The department also cited GE Funding’s commitment to make restitution

What I would like to see within the Christian religions is the leaders actually following in the foot steps of the Christ that they profess to love and obey. I would like them to give up their fortunes and travel the world and live the life of Christ.

The Christ I know was a man that traveled to where the people were and not live a lavish lifestyle. He lived among the people and did not hold himself above the masses. He lived the life he spoke of. How can you expect people to believe you when you live a lie??

One of the most blatant examples is the Roman Catholic Church. The Pope talks about helping the poor and sits on more wealth than a lot of countries. It seems the churches position is if they gave away their wealth then the church would not exist. My position is that if their god is true they could get rid of all their possessions, churches, money, opened their libraries and their god would still exist. Their position seems to be that the church is more important than the people where their Christ thought the people were more important.

If their god exists then he exists outside of the church. He lives among the people. If all the churches were destroyed then god would still be there.

I would like to see the religious leaders move among the people like they told to do and not sit on thrones made of gold.

"RECALL THE KOCHSUCKER NOW!" it reads in block letters, likely a reference to reports that the billionaire oil magnate Koch Brothers provided funding to Walker through their PAC, or perhaps to the ensuing prank call made to Walker by a Buffalo journalist pretending to be David Koch.

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"You know, people with kids are driving by. And you know there are little kids who are 8, 9, 10 years old who are old enough to be able to read that and might say, 'Mommy, what does that mean?'" Andrea Lombard, first vice chairwoman of the Sauk County Wisconsin Republican Party, told the Baraboo News Republic. "Well, how does Mommy explain that? I'm not sure."

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And while supporters of the Walker recall effort continue to near their target, reports of their opposition getting in trouble for alleged actions against volunteers continue to pop up around the state.

The St. Paul Pioneer Press reported Tuesday that a 32-year-old River Falls woman was arrested over the weekend after workers collecting recall petitions claimed that she had screamed profanity at them, then thrown their table toward the street and spat at them.

A Pentagon public relations program that sought to transform high-profile military analysts into “surrogates” and “message force multipliers” for the Bush administration complied with Defense Department regulations and directives, the Pentagon’s inspector general has concluded after a two-year investigation.

The inquiry was prompted by articles published in The New York Times in 2008 that described how the Pentagon, in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks, cultivated close ties with retired officers who worked as military analysts for television and radio networks. The articles also showed how military analysts affiliated with defense contractors sometimes used their special access to seek advantage in the competition for contracts. In response to the articles, the Pentagon suspended the program and members of Congress asked the Defense Department’s inspector general to investigate.

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The inquiry found that from 2002 to 2008, Mr. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon organized 147 events for 74 military analysts. These included 22 meetings at the Pentagon, 114 conference calls with generals and senior Pentagon officials and 11 Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Twenty of the events, according to a 35-page report of the inquiry’s findings, involved Mr. Rumsfeld or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or both.

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Wesley K. Clark, a retired four-star Army general who worked as a military analyst for CNN, told investigators he took it as a sign that the Pentagon “was displeased” with his commentary when CNN officials told him he would no longer be invited to special briefings for military analysts. General Clark told investigators that CNN officials made him feel as if he was less valued as a commentator because “he wasn’t trusted by the Pentagon.” At one point, he said, a CNN official told him that the White House had asked CNN to “release you from your contract as a commentator.”